Posts Tagged ‘Business Models’

For website owners and advertisers, user intent matters. But those ever-desirable eyeballs may as well be attached to sticks for all we know about their owners much of the time. The feelings, the mood, the intent of site visitors is incredibly valuable to understand, because knowing this and serving up an appropriate user experience enables happier, more satisfied individuals.

Yieldbot is a publisher-side analytics and targeting platform which “captures and organizes the realtime intent existing in web publishers and makes it available to advertisers so they can match offers and ads at the exact moment consumers are most open to receiving relevant marketing.”

“Movenbank just released its financial scoring system that allows users to monitor and understand their financial data in a whole new way. This innovative real-time financial credibility score combines data from shopping patterns, daily spending and social influence into a personalized ‘CREDscore.’ … As part of their services Movenbank will provide instant real-time feedback on spending, with personalized insights that affect behavior.

Today I’ve been checking out Movenbank – in the context of social media data beginning to affect our financial statuses. The site / service is presented very much from the perspective that banks have been letting us down with the way they offer products and services, and make decisions about our credit scores, and loans, unfairly… taking this ‘out of our hands.’

Movenbank will, in contrast, develop a view of individuals based on personality, and behaviour, some of it determined by a ‘fun personality questionnaire that identifies your financial profile:’

It’s too early to judge Movenbank, and what overall, this financial services innovation will do for us. But I think it’s worth asking a few questions about the implications of tying up self-identified personality traits, social media data and shopping behaviour to our financial ‘CRED.’

How will it work? Will we get a better score from consistently buying sensible organic vegetables and pulses, rather than last minute flights to Biarritz or a gorgeous pair of Alexander McQueens? And why should we?

As I understand it credit scoring is determined by how much you have been earning, borrowing, and paying back. What do we really gain from adding social media and precise shopping activity into the mix? Will some with poor traditional credit scores be able to borrow more? Will some with good traditional credit scores, be marked down in CRED for a personality or behaviour that this new score deems dodgy in some way?

Seems to me many of our financial problems have been caused by too much credit, not too little… if this is another way of opening the gates for people deemed a ‘risk’ by other measures, to borrow… is it a step forward? And will it really be fairer for us to be financially scored on our Facebook likes, tweets, and late night impulse Amazon purchases? For our financial status to be based on what we buy, and who we are, or have constructed ourselves to be, as well as, or instead of, how much we spend, borrow and repay?

Bloggers and sites need revenue to survive… so sponsored content and links are a norm we have become used to. Most web users understand and appreciate its place to help support the content and engagement they love… they grasp that flexible online business models are integral to quality and innovation. But the key from a publisher’s perspective and any brand placing content – is disclosure. iVillage is currently doing this in a neat way on its home page – highlighting, and tactfully disclosing content on its site that provides a revenue stream via sponsorship:

For formal guidance on staying within the law when sponsoring content or bloggers online, follow the links below:

I, like many people, don’t have a problem with Pinterest making money off of user content. The links are modified seamlessly [via skimlinks] so it doesn’t affect the experience. Pinterest likely should disclose this practice to users even if they aren’t required to do so by law, if only to maintain trust with their users.

Do you care that Pinterest is modifying your pins? Do you think they should disclose it to users?

“We could learn a lot from the music industry, and the rather terrible ways the music industry has tried to combat piracy”…. Rovio sees it as “futile” to pursue pirates through the courts, except in cases where it feels the products they are selling are harmful to the Angry Birds brand, or ripping off its fans. When that’s not the case, Rovio sees it as a way to attract more fans, even if it is not making money from the products. “Piracy may not be a bad thing: it can get us more business at the end of the day.”

Can P&G make money in places where people earn $2 a day? “Our innovation strategy is not just diluting the top-tier product for the lower-end consumer… You have to discretely innovate for every one of those consumers on that economic curve, and if you don’t do that, you’ll fail”

Threshold charges subject the logic of the print bundle — a bit of everything for everybody, slathered with ads — to two new questions: What do our most committed users want? And what will turn our most frequent readers into committed users? … This is new territory for mainstream papers, who have always had head count rather than engagement as their principal business metric